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Free One-Day Workshop for Educators at USC - Holding Up Half the Sky (and often a whole lot more): Women in Modern China

Session(s) date

Session(s) date:

Saturday, April 9, 2016 - 8:30am to 3:30pm

Join us on April 9 for a Saturday workshop focusing on women in modern China. Too often the experience of women is neglected in discussions of China’s tumultuous 20th and 21st centuries, so we have invited three authors of recent books on women in China to talk with us. Among the topics we’ll discuss is how women sought to shape their own destinies and how Chinese states sought to change their status and, sometimes, to mobilize them for particular causes.

Margaret Kuo teaches history at California State University, Long Beach. Her research focuses on gender, law, and society. She’s the author of Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China, which uses marital disputes to examine study the impact of efforts by China’s government in the 1920s and 1930s to modernize the country’s laws and practices. Kuo has also written on “rights consciousness” and a controversy that bubbled up in the 1930s over married women’s surnames. An attorney prior to becoming a historian, Kuo previously taught at McGill University.

Gail Hershatter teaches history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also heads the East Asian Studies program. One of the profession’s most accomplished scholars, Hershatter was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2011-2012. She’s received numerous research and teaching awards. Her most recent book is The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past which looks at the experience of women in rural Shanxi in the 1950s and 1960s. She’s also written Women in China's Long Twentieth Century, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in 20th-Century Shanghai, and The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949.

Mei Fong is the author of the new and widely-discussed book, One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment. She covered Hong Kong and China for the Wall Street Journal and won a shared Pulitzer for her stories on China’s transformation ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Her stories on China’s migrant workers also won a 2006 Human Rights Press Award from Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Correspondents Club, as well as awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia and Society of Professional Journalists. Fong previously taught at USC and is now a fellow at New America.

Participating teachers will receive a copy of One Child. Readings will be distributed ahead of the workshop. Lunch will be provided. After the workshop, participants will be able to tour the Book Festival, America’s largest.